Friday, January 23, 2015

Don't Forget I Love You

Here is a poem about the unfriendly shape reality can take. In a totally different arena I had my illusions slapped across my face again. There are ways in which I radically do not fit in contemporary society. I can go for years and gradually forget all over again that there is cognitive dissonance between me and convention in certain areas.

I am no monster* but there are parts of the world that are seriously alien to my ways - things I would do very differently from others and I really depend on God to keep me out of trouble. It occurs to me once again, for example, that I was ethically set up to be the dope dealer I became, for one - and to leave it behind abruptly under the pressures I found also. I left no one hanging. All accounts were square.

I am a good lover. I have received ample feedback on that score. I am also not so good as a long term husband. I have only been one once but Mama! what a debacle that became.

There are, because I lead a life where I have many people in it, many who believe my capacity for friendship. And I retired from my lifework in good standing but rather poor health. I was personally somewhat ashamed but also assured no one thought ill of me.

And yet, there is still this vagrant hair - a mole exists and out of it comes a strangely colored corkscrew of a hair that grows back even when I pluck it out. I see some stuff very differently from many people and if I act on that stuff I might find big trouble. I just went through an exercise of trading views in an internet setting which makes it clear how differently others see stuff.

That dismays me.

So of course it comes as no surprise that this is the poem to post today.

Don't Forget I Love You

It curls in me like
thin gray leaders of old smoke.
It has the quiet
stench of the ash trays
of that drug house we lived in,
of the dusty floors.

I fear the way you
sometimes look at me. I know
you are recalling
my deflated shape
and I cannot hide from it
so I shiver, shake.

‎November ‎26, ‎2010 8:30 PM

*My mother called me "Monster" or "Monstro" but I never took it that serious. :)

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The View From The Northern Wall

Some years ago my poetry took on a mythic flavor and I became a character in my own poems, a mage, "the man of the Northern Wall". This apellation is not completely fictional. My middle name is Noordwal, a Dutch term for north wall, though in current Dutch it mainly means north bank as in riverbank. I was told that an ancestor, a Portugese Jew escaping the Inquisition, settled in a small Dutch town and took this name from where he settled, near the north wall of the town. I have thought for a long time that -wal meant wall, think my mother told me that. A linguist might say that my usage is no longer common, is an older usage, but then the Inquisition happened in Portugal a few centuries ago, right around the time the Moors lost control of the Iberian Peninsula and the Jews lost the modest protection given them by Islam. Now I write as this mage, my poetry persona.